Fedora has a strong community that is ready to help you. Because users and contributors span the globe, a key element to the project is communication. forums , mailing lists and IRC provide quick and easy ways to communicate.

Interacting with the Community

Make sure that you understand and follow our guidelines before you start communicating with others in the Fedora community. Some basic guidelines can be found in the Mailing List Guidelines and the IRC How-To.

Helping Yourself

Before seeking help from others, please take a little time to review the huge variety of self-help resources that are available. Check out the Fedora Documentation and FAQs. If you are already using Fedora, man and info pages provide a lot of useful information. You can access these by using the man and info commands. For example, to use man to learn about yum, you would use:

man yum

Press q to quit.

To read the info pages on gcc, you can use:

info gcc

Press q to quit.

There are a number of other documents available on your system under the documentation folder at /usr/share/doc/. The rpm command provides an option to list all of the documentation associated with a particular package. As an example, to list all of the documents available from the "coreutils" package, you can use:

rpm -qd coreutils

While these commands work from a terminal, other easy-to-use tools are also available. Check the menus for your desktop and programs. Don't forget to check the Fedora Documentation.

Providing Feedback to Developers

If you believe you have found a bug or would like to suggest enhancements, use the Bugzilla bug tracking system.

The Ask Fedora forum or users mailing list is the place for most questions.

Development discussions happen in the Fedora development mailing list, devel, and we encourage community users and developers interested in Fedora to participate there. You can post in this list for development-related discussions that are not straight-forward bug reports or feature requests. This is not a suitable place to ask general questions. If you are using a test release or the development version of Fedora, post feedback to the test mailing list and bug reports to Bugzilla. Developers do not usually follow discussions in end-user sources since they are high-traffic and not as efficient as a tracker like Bugzilla. For other mailing list options, see Mailing Lists below.

Forums

Forums provide Fedora users with an easy way to get help for any issue that may arise. Most of the forums are extremely active and provide structured access to a number of knowledgeable and helpful Fedora users.

Ask Fedora is a community knowledge base and support forum hosted by Fedora Project.

fedoraforum.org is an independent community website and not hosted or affiliated to Fedora Project or Red Hat. It is a platform for users to help each other. Other forums are also available:

Community Websites

Mailing Lists

Mailing lists are special email addresses which send email to all users who have subscribed to them. Sending an email to a mailing list reaches all users interested in discussing a specific topic and users who are available to help other users with that topic.

Using Mailing Lists To subscribe to a mailing list, follow the appropriate link below and fill out the subscription form, or send an email message to <listname>-request@lists.fedoraproject.org (replace <listname> with the desired mailing list name, such as users) with only the word subscribe in the subject. The mailing lists are hosted at https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo.

Personal InformationFedora is a very visible and transparent project, which means that its mailing lists are archived and mirrored in many places on the internet outside of our control. Please use caution when sharing personal information with Fedora on a mailing list, because it is not possible for us to remove any postings from the wider Internet universe after they are sent. For more details, please refer to Fedora's Privacy Policy.

NOTE Certain etiquette is required to help mailing lists work efficiently and smoothly. See the Mailing list guidelines for specific points to follow while using Fedora Project mailing lists.

If you are using the mailing lists and see a post that is off-topic, you can direct the user to the PostIsOffTopic page, which will provide them with information to guide them in list selection in the future. Please do not be unnecessarily rude, as it hurts Fedora when you offend other users.

User Mailing Lists

users - General discussion and community assistance for users of Fedora releases. If you want help with a problem installing or using Fedora, this is the list for you. You might also use Ask Fedora forum instead

announce - Announcements of Fedora changes and events. To stay aware of major Fedora news, subscribe to this list.

NOTE You may be required to register your user nickname (nick) and identify with that nick. Otherwise, you may not be able to join or be heard on the IRC channel. There is a page describing how to register your nick at freenode.net.

WARNING Some of the Fedora channels ban users that are logged into their system as root. Make sure that you are logged into your system as a normal user and that any ident server you may have running is accurately reporting your username.

User Help

#fedora[?] - General discussion and community assistance for users of Fedora releases. If you want help with a problem installing or using a currently maintained release of Fedora, this is the list for you, but register with Freenode and read the FAQ before joining.

More Information

Collaboration tool

The text collaboration tool called Gobby can help you to collaborate with other Fedora contributors. Gobby is a first-class, GUI-based text collaboration tool. You can use it, in conjunction with a collaboration server, to work together in real time with an unlimited number of people on any text based file, code or content. Fedora offers a server for Gobby to maximize your online experience with your collaborators.